Property taxes are a symptom. The disease is Pennsylvania’s unprecedented school funding crisis. The cure is levying fair taxes on corporations so we can restore Gov. Tom Corbett’s nearly $1 billion in school funding cuts.

This school funding crisis began when Gov. Corbett decided that corporate tax breaks were more important than funding public education. Now, this crisis is impacting students, parents, and taxpayers in every school district in the Commonwealth, and it’s getting worse every day.

There is nothing wrong with lawmakers looking for ways to make the property tax system fair and equitable. However, the best way to achieve this goal is to fairly and equitably fund the public schools. And cutting nearly $1 billion is certainly not the way to do it.

Pennsylvanians in every community have seen the havoc these school funding cuts have wreaked on their schools. Class-size increases and program cuts are now the rule, and not the exception. There are 20,000 fewer educators in our schools and classrooms. And investments in programs that help our students learn have fallen off the table as school districts struggle to balance their budgets.

In the face of these challenges, it is no surprise that school districts are relying more heavily on property taxes. Gov. Corbett decided that state government should give the public schools less, and he’s forced local property taxpayers to pick up the slack and contribute more.

Property taxes have always been a major source of school district revenues. But, local reliance on property taxes has increased dramatically over the past several decades. That’s because state support has plummeted.

In 1975, state funding accounted for 55 percent of public school revenues. In 2012, Gov. Corbett provided only 35.6 percent. In fact, the most recent statistics show that Pennsylvania ranks 47th of the 50 states in state support for the public schools.

So, it should come as no surprise that property taxes have gone up, as state support has gone down.

What is surprising? How recent legislative proposals to increase personal income and sales taxes in order to cut property taxes would actually dig a deeper hole for public schools and taxpayers. And how Gov. Corbett has made corporate tax giveaways a higher priority than public school funding.

The state’s own independent fiscal office has reported that this property tax proposal would create a $2.6 billion revenue shortfall by fiscal 2018-19 - and that’s after increasing state sales and income taxes on Pennsylvania taxpayers.

Gov. Corbett’s relentless focus on providing tax breaks to big corporations drains more than $1 billion from Pennsylvania’s funding resources each year. To put that in perspective, just stopping tax-break handouts to corporations that don’t need them would generate enough revenue to restore the governor’s school funding cuts – without costing individual taxpayers a dime.

So, these wrongheaded policies don’t even treat the symptoms of the disease. In fact, they are more like a doctor giving a patient the wrong medicine, and making his illness worse.

The good news is that the problems associated with the school funding crisis, property taxes, and corporate tax giveaways are not insurmountable.

Lawmakers can solve them. If Pennsylvania begins to tax corporations fairly, the state can restore the funding the governor cut from our schools.

It can be done.

To do it, we need to begin by diagnosing the disease, and not just treating the symptoms with medicine that will make it worse.

Michael Crossey is a special education teacher in the Keystone Oaks School District, and president of the Pennsylvania State Education Association.